Cody Yantis

"Brightness," from Cody Yantis's new album, Resonant Memory, begins with pastoral guitar work and samples of birds and other ambient sounds, giving the track the feeling of a Daniel Lanois song. But by the time "Brightness III" comes through your stereo, the tone has darkened. On "Brightness IV," the music has a broken quality, like that of tapes from different sessions spliced together and layered, sometimes backward. "Simple Matters" employs spare melodies on banjo, cello and violin next to swells of abstract sound and indistinct noises, with little apparent attempt to clean up the anomalies of the recording process. The effect is impressionistic, evoking the way memory can be so vivid to us at times and hazy and elusive at others.